Farmers and volunteers are working together for the conservation of Curlews. Sarah Smith from Clapham Curlew Cluster talks about the project.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 So my name is Sarah Smith and I'm talking here from Clapham, the area of Clapham in North Yorkshire
00:06 and I'm representing the Curlew-Clapham-Curlew cluster, which is a cluster of, we're now up to 15 farms,
00:14 last year it was 12 farms and 18 volunteers going out and doing wader surveys in partnership with the RSPB.
00:20 We need to find out how many waders we have. Curlew is obviously the name we're using because they're so iconic,
00:27 but it's all waders. We have problems with lapwings now, we've lost nearly 40, well 48% since 1995 to 2020,
00:36 48% of both Curlew and lapwing have disappeared. So we need to find out what we have on our farms in this area
00:44 to know then what measures we can put in to actually try and protect the nests.
00:49 The south of England, south of the Pennines, only have 500 breeding pairs left.
00:54 In Northern Ireland there's only 100 breeding pairs left. And if we're not careful we'll wake up in the north of England,
01:00 which is one of the last strongholds, and find we're in a similar situation because they live so long,
01:06 you can think that they're going to continue to have many up here, people think we have a lot.
01:13 So we need to find out what we have and to see the data to then decide what measures we can put in to help.
01:20 Well we're looking this year for the first time, we've got a payment through the Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust,
01:25 we've got a fund, and with that fund we're allowing £500 to leave an acre around a nest.
01:32 So if the volunteers along with RSPB find the nest on the farmer's land, we can talk to him or her and say
01:39 would you be willing to leave an acre around un-mowed, because often they're in silage fields which need cutting,
01:46 or hay meadows, it's less problematic with hay meadows, it's really the silage.
01:51 We can say to the farmer £500, we should cover his costs, or their costs, and so that's one measure which is really important.
02:01 Some of the volunteers are young, and also some of the next farming generation are coming on board,
02:08 Will Dawson is in his 20s and he's very much been very proactive along with his father John in setting up this.
02:16 So there is, I think the next generation are really important, and with that we've done an education project with the schools.
02:24 So we've done Settle Primary School and Kirby Mallon Primary School, and we worked with the children to actually go out to a farm,
02:32 Hilltop Farm in Mallon, and they looked at the farm, understood how you can farm in a curly, friendly way,
02:39 and from that we then did textile pieces, we did drawings, we did posters, we did poetry,
02:46 and we're going to take that now in an exhibition form and take it around from Yorkshire Dales National Park up in Hawes.
02:53 We're going to go to Settle, Kirby Mallon Church, Clapham Church, so we're trying to raise awareness throughout the whole region.
03:00 I'd like to see a lot more farms, I think it's all about working on the environment across the landscape now,
03:06 I think that's where the payments are going to come, I think that's where, if you've only got just one farm,
03:11 the curly, they generally come back to the same area, but it's really working across landscapes,
03:16 which is why it's so important to get farms to come together with the volunteers,
03:20 so that we can start to put in some schemes that will actually cover the land, the whole of the landscape.